Ken Loach is conventionally seen as a throwback now, his
doggedly dissident films about working-class heroes not so much Old
Labour as something close to Cretaceous. Loach, now 68, remains a
torchbearer for gut-level social realism and cinema with an
unembarrassed political agenda. His most recent films have dealt
with a strike by immigrant workers in California, the drug trade in
Glaswegian housing estates and a bloke battling the demon drink.
Nil points for cool there, Ken. All that stuff is too, too worthy.
We're doing designer violence again this year. We don't want
messages.

I am just old enough, however, to remember when Ken Loach's
films were the very voice of their age, or at least the age as it
was being lived in Britain. Up the Junction (1965), made
by Loach with producer Tony Garnett for the BBC's then thriving
drama department, was a sparkling encapsulation of Swinging London.
He followed it with Cathy Come Home (1966) which,
famously, told such a powerful story of a family sliding into
homelessness that it was taken up in Parliament, finally leading to
a change in the law governing evictions. Not many films have
actually led to legislative change, but Loach showed that it was
possible.

His first film for the cinema, Poor Cow, came next,
followed by Kes, the story of a deprived young boy who finds
release in training a kestrel, now regarded as one of the finest
films ever made in Britain. Both were huge hits: messages were cool
in the '60s.

Thirty years later, Ken Loach's approach to filmmaking has not
changed much. His framing is as seamlessly fluid as ever; Loach is
so routinely dismissed as a dull social realist that his fluency
with the camera is rarely noted. His approach to script, where
actors are only given the bits they need for themselves and are
sometimes startled mid-scene by the things the other characters say
and do, is now so well known that he refuses to talk about it.
Critics complain that while he might surprise his actors, he never
surprises them: every film is about working-class people, an unfair
system, the struggle rendered in miniature. Whether that is a bad
thing, however, is a matter of opinion.

Ae Fond Kiss, the third film Loach has made in Glasgow,
is about a young man of Pakistani extraction who becomes involved
with his younger sister's Irish Catholic teacher, the feisty Roisin
(Eva Birtwhistle). It is a romance between people who ring
absolutely true - Loach has a great track record in casting
non-actors in key roles, in this case a postgraduate student, Atta
Yaqub, as the slightly rakish Casim - but it is also, of course,
ideologically driven. Loach is incensed by the current tide of
hatred towards Muslims. This is his response.

Like any other immigrant community, he says, British Muslims are
more or less traditional, more or less part of the wider community
and, like any community anywhere, constantly changing. "The use of
phrases like 'Muslim fundamentalist' and 'terrorist' in the same
sentence (means) that many Muslim communities are feeling
vulnerable," he says. "The imprecise use of language means everyone
is tarred with that brush." The results are personally devastating:
while making Ae Fond Kiss, he met Muslim children who were
suddenly too frightened to walk to school.

He wanted, he says, to show another kind of Muslim life: an
ordinary family at the daily business of adjusting between
cultures, doing their best. Casim is a DJ out in the wide world,
his sister a keen student with academic ambitions. At home,
however, they are expected to knuckle down one day to arranged
marriages. It is not that their parents are monsters: they simply
want their children to have the best of what they have had.

Loach and his scriptwriter, Paul Laverty, met dozens of families
that were like Casim's, in as much as they were trying their best
to steer between their two cultures. "I was told terrible stories
about people being kidnapped, brought to Pakistan and held, their
passports taken from them, in rooms where they were forced to have
sex with men they had just married, but I don't think that would
have been very typical of the community at all," says Laverty. "We
wanted to find a family that was more complex, that, like most
immigrant families, were trying to get their children to study
hard, who had worked like hell to get there. I wanted to do justice
to those people."

Both Loach and Laverty, who has written the scripts for his past
five features, were uneasily conscious that they might come across
as tourists, making fiction from a culture they could not
understand. "But once you actually start to talk to people - and
they were extremely welcoming - you find actually that the dynamics
of the family are very like the dynamics of any family anywhere,"
says Loach. "People are often quite happy to talk about their lives
if they feel they can trust you. And as long as you go with the
intention of listening rather than telling, I think it's OK. You're
always surprised by how complex people are, how their experiences
of life evade stereotypes and simplification."

Some of the scenes within the family are performed in Punjabi.
Yes, says Loach, he still used his improvisational technique, where
different characters had different scripts, even though he could
not understand what they were saying. It turned out to be
surprisingly easy. "It worked just the same, really," he says.
"Basically the script is all there; they just wove around it once
or twice. There was someone muttering in my ear telling me what
they were saying, but you do get a sense of whether the scene is
going in the right direction."

To some extent, Loach has come back into his own from his
doldrums in the '80s, when nobody wanted to finance the kinds of
films he makes. Since then, new co-production deals with France and
Germany and support from Scottish Screen have helped him make up
for lost time. In 1990 he made Hidden Agenda and Riff
Raff; he then continued apace with Raining Stones
(1993), Ladybird Ladybird (1994), Land &
Freedom (1995), Carla's Song (1996), My Name is
Joe (1998) and Bread and Roses (2000). This latest
crop of films has won a slew of prizes at festivals in Europe,
where he has been held in more consistently high regard than in his
home country.

The days when films could change public policy, however, Loach
thinks are over. There will never be another Cathy Come
Home. "I think politicians are more sophisticated in the way
they respond to the media," he says. "At the time we did Cathy
Come Home, the politicians weren't so manipulative and
television broadcasting was very new. I think that if they knew a
program like that was coming up now they would get their reaction
in first."

But perhaps the sheer humanity of his films, the worldview that
refuses to write people off as losers or condemn the weak, will
have as much impact in the long run. The political climate is
changing, in the cinema as much as anywhere else. We are beginning
to listen to messages again. And in the future, when the current
cinematic vogue for Britlads with guns and hooligan inclinations is
long forgotten, there will remain the collected works of that
English master, Ken Loach.